Why great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy refused the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature
At the age of 78, the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy declined consideration for the Nobel Prize in Literature, firmly convinced of the moral harm of money.
When the Russian Academy of Sciences nominated him, Tolstoy wrote to his Finnish friend and translator Arvid Järnefelt, asking him to intercede with the Swedish Academy to award the prize to someone else.
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Järnefelt — surprised but loyal — fulfilled the unusual request. As a result, the 1907 prize went to the relatively unknown Italian poet Giosuè Carducci.
Tolstoy later said that his refusal spared him the heavy burden of deciding what to do with such a large sum of money.
He believed that “in money itself, in the very possession of it, there is something immoral.”
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